


I - Hope vs Disaster

by Flipdart



Category: Wearing The Cape
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 19:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3541742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flipdart/pseuds/Flipdart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Astra and the Young Sentinels are back in the flood relief effort on the Mississippi, and there's a day to be saved....</p>
            </blockquote>





	I - Hope vs Disaster

We were about a thousand feet up and decelerating for landing when I saw the levee start to collapse.

 

I was lounging on the top of the arrowhead shaped transport, letting the turbofan engines do the work for a change, when I saw the bottom of the raised roadway we were heading for suddenly spurt a horizontal fountain of brown water. A giant traffic jam of cars, trucks and buses was sitting on top of the levee and now suddenly the tarmac under it was visibly sinking.

 

“Oh _heck_! Team, brace for hard descent!”

 

I yelled out the warning, rolled over, grabbed the two hardened alloy grips in front of me and shoved the aircraft forward. I could only hope my team had had time to buckle up - I hit the thing with close to twelve tons of force, and the aircraft took off like a missile. It got easier when Shelly cut the engines trying to hold it up, but I was an Atlas-type Superhero and that meant if I wanted to go somewhere I _went_. We dropped out of the sky as the sideways fountain of mud under the road turned into a volcano, and I could see people abandoning cars and vehicles on the road as they get the hell out of there. They never should have been there in the first place, who tries to evacuate from one approaching flood on a road running right by another, for gods sake?

 

The collapse was pretty slow, the road drooping as high pressure water eroded away at its support, and I started to relax a tiny little bit. Everyone seemed to be aware of the imminent collapse and were standing well back. We were still five hundred feet up and I was easing off the juice when with my superhuman vision I saw that three heat sources in one of the vans hadn’t evacuated with everyone else. Oh hell.....

 

“Deceleration! Flyers out, now! Grendel hard landing, Shelly mark my target!”

 

I stood on the brakes - why I could do any of this was totally inexplicable, but I could, so I braced against absolutely nothing at all and pulled at the aircraft, slowing us down with the same breakneck force I’d pushed us. Once I heard the engines start again and I was sure I hadn’t killed my own team I bailed out, trusting them to follow.

 

Three hundred feet up, and I could see three human outlines in the van, moving slowly. They were the only ones left near the collapse now, everyone else had fled. I dropped like an anvil but I didn’t have _time_. I saw the back door of the van open and got one glimpse of an elderly face starting at the new river of mud eating the road behind them and then van and passengers were dropping into the river themselves as the road gave way.

 

I was seconds away. I didn’t hesitate.  

 

“Shelly, give me vision!” It was almost a prayer, because I had no idea if my best friend and cybernetic A.I. ghost even could but... I hit the mud.

 

With my eyes shut, I saw the van. Blue outlines like radar - which it probably was, actually, relayed to my contact lenses by my omnipresent BFF - projected on the back of my eyelids, and it was crumpling under the weight of fast moving mud; I reached for it and with blind eyes felt for the reinforced frame. I gently took a grip and pulled upwards slowly, moving with the flow, aware of just how fragile the steel under my hands was. Gradually we rose upwards and then suddenly we were free and clear of the mud, hanging over the torrent. I opened my eyes, and I could see what I’d “rescued” - a muddy ball of metal, twisted and broken. I could see heat, but that didn’t mean anyone was alive.

 

I landed us on the first patch of open road I could find, lowering the ball gently to the tarmac and touching down behind it. I grabbed the rear doors with both hands, ripped them off the frame and moved in.

 

One was dead. I’d seen him alive about ten seconds ago looking out the back of the van, but now he was dead. Have to move on. Two were still alive. One male, one female, elderly, badly bruised, probable broken bones and internal injuries. They needed to be stabilized and medivaced as soon as possible. Megaton and Tsuris landed behind me, carrying emergency  medical kits, and as the flyer landed we got to work.

 

This, this was the hard part. Ripping steel with my bare hands, levitating, taking tank shells to the chest - no effort needed. Really, I occasionally floated off the bed in my sleep or crushed a door handle by accident. Fighting to save the lives of two badly wounded people, both of them elderly, fragile, trapped in a wrecked vehicle on a rainy night... It took all seven of us, and four army medics who came running up out of nowhere a few minutes later, a desperately hard fought quarter of an hour to stabilize them both and stop some of the bleeding.

 

I was trembling with exhaustion by the time we got them strapped down to two stretchers and safe to move. We slotted the two boards together onto a carry frame for me and I grabbed it and took off, Tsuris flying with me to keep the boards stable with his areokinesis air control superpower. Shelly had located the closest ER and called ahead, then provided the virtual reality navigator I followed for ten minutes of careful flight.

 

Twenty five minutes after I saw them go into the mud we landed in a brightly lit hospital foyer with a medical team waiting for us. I touched the ground and became a bystander again as the team hustled both victims onto trolleys and began hooking up IV’s and monitors, a frantic fight I had no part in. We watched our saves run through the door by the mob and it was finally over.

 

I’d done this too many times to vomit, but I did drop onto the nearest bench. Adrenalin shakes were pretty normal for me now - I sat and let them work themselves out while Tsuris, who was less of a jerk then he let on, sat next to me and breathed deep, face pale. This job could be exhausting.

 

\----------

 

I showered off in the staff room at the hospital. They normally didn't let people do this, but there were some perks of being famous I could really appreciate. It was hot and it got the mud off me, but even my verne-tech fabric bodysuit couldn’t beat Mississippi mud baths, and despite a quick scrub and rinse getting back into my blue and whites wasn’t fun. twenty minutes after landing we took off again, Tsuris still holding a cafeteria sandwich he’d been picking at while he waited for me to wash off. We didn’t push it, but we were back at the road in five minutes flat.

 

The team had made themselves useful while we were gone. Most of the backed up traffic on the road had been cleared, Grendel bulking out and carting abandoned cars on his back while Crash, Ozma and about twenty army guys organised the mess and got people off the levee. We’d lost another few hundred yards of it to the flood, while Shelly's Galatea drone had been surveying the levee with Megaton. She imparted her wisdom once we landed.

 

“The levee’s a goner. I found the civil engineering records on the internet and it was abandoned  in the nineteen sixties when they built a chemical plant and the town closer to the river. It hasn’t been maintained, farmers have drilled pipes through it in a couple of places and the water height is massively over its design limit. You can forget trying to repair it.”

 

I shrugged. Civil engineering was the Army Corp of Engineers job, and ACE wasn’t here.

 

“Not our problem, yet. Anything from the town?”

 

“we got a request for an update from a guy named Major Payne, if you can believe it.”

 

I may have blinked a little. “Major... Pain? Is he a hero or a villain?”

 

Shelly rolled Galatea’s eyes. “Hes a Major. As in Sir, yes Sir, Major Sir. Hes our chief army dude for the duration. Hes got three hundred regulars on disaster relief and he’s in Barton right now, leading the evacuation.”

 

“Is he the _idiot_ who sent a couple of thousand people down this deathtrap of a road?”

 

“Apparently not. He say’s the local FEMA guy, Michael Fairbanks, only declared a general evacuation this morning and refused to close the road until after the traffic jam had already formed. To be fair, there's only two roads out of town. I’m looking at drone footage right now and I don’t like the look of of the south road either. There’s at least five thousand people left in Barton and the town’s already half surrounded by flooding. The water is off, the power is off, the sewers are flooded and the mud just keeps on rising. They have to be getting desperate.”

 

Ok. this was now officially more than I’d bargained, begged and pleaded for. We’d been benched a month ago after our last deployment upriver had ended in a very public fight with another CAI team. We hadn’t started it, but we’d finished it, and then we’d spent four weeks in a very public row about it. The Young Sentinels - us - had been denounced, demonised and mocked by the media, and it had been a nightmare fight to prove that Power Team had thrown the first punch and attacked us, despite almost twenty live video recordings of it. Some people just weren't interested in “evidence”. Our official sanction to be superheros had been “reviewed” and was still only provisionally granted, and the media fight had been as much about trying to blacken the name of the Sentinel’s senior team as anything. We hadn’t lost - we had too much evidence on our side to lose the case - but our haters knew that if you throw enough mud at someone, they’ll look dirty.

 

Getting us deployed again after all that had taken the collapse of half the levee system on the mississippi and FEMA getting forced out of its local office in Memphis this morning by the flooding. Washington had taken over and immediately hit the panic button, and we’d been reactivated and assigned to one of the many new crises the last wave of levee failures had handed them. Except it looked like they’d massively underestimated how bad the situation was.

 

“Right. Great. Call the FEMA head office, tell them we need urgent assistance, and see if you can kick this up the chain a bit as well. Get Blackstone in the loop, he knows a lot more about twisting arms than we do. Tell them we need priority assistance to evacuate the town and we’re about to lose our road link. I do not intend to try and save the day with just one CAI team and three hundred troopers. Get me reinforcements, Shell.”

 

“On it, boss lady.”

 

“Boss lady. Aren't I just. Mount up, everyone.”

 

\--------

 

We flew into town as soon as we could, me, Megaton and Tsuris escorting the flyer with Crash, Ozma, Grendel and Galatea riding inside.

 

More than half surrounded by flooded fields, the place didn’t look like it’d been doing well even before the sky dropped on it. A lot of boarded over buildings had been converted into refugee housing, and the town square - a big patch of grass now covered in tents - showed some artfully concealed decay around it. The civic center had a lovely brightly painted mural wall, for instance, that blocked the view of a fire gutted wing of the building. A lot of tall trees and some elaborate billboards managed to block the view of the giant chemical plant looming about a mile closer to the river. I was impressed by the effort they’d made, but all was chaos now.

 

The constant rain was falling on a seething mess of people in the center of town, all swarming around the tent city that covered the muddy grass square where the army and FEMA had set up a distribution center for the refugees. People, men, women, kids, were going every direction at once in the streets while sweating soldiers manhandled pallet loads of food and supplies under the downpour. A convoy of trucks had been formed up along the roadway and troopers were marshalling people onto them, keeping order and sorting out family groups and kids. I’d seen a lot worse - dreams of the aftermath of LA’s Big One still woke me up in tears - but it was still bad enough. There was too much disorder in the camp. People looked resentful, angry. An air of panic was hanging over everyone here. Things could get much worse very quickly.  

 

We roared overhead, me, Tsuris and Megaton holding formation with the team flyer as we passed overhead and landed it on the roof of the civic center. It was flashy, got people’s attention, let them know help was here - and it kept our most vulnerable asset away from a potential mob, if they realised they were about to be stranded here. I landed directly on the grass with tsuris, but Megaton’s thrust tail was way too dangerous for low level flight around people so he followed the flyer in. We found the FEMA guy by finding the loudest argument.

 

Fairbanks, the FEMA Coordination Officer and the man officially in charge, was locked in combat with a tall, redheaded, slightly asian looking lady with what I swore was an Irish accent. Shelly’s ever useful head up display tagged her silently as the town mayor and gave her a name, Michiko Mackellin, known as Miko. She was cursing like a sailor while she berated Fairbanks.

 

“Six hours, six bloody hours, stuck in traffic on a collapsing levee while you sat on your thumbs and dithered about it! If you’d actually listened last bloody week when Mike told you the levee was gonna go and we had to evacuate the town we wouldn’t be in this fuckin’ mess, but you give him a load of crap about his education and tell him to piss off? You fuckwit mother-lovin’ whoreson, you almost got a couple hundred people killed today! Now we’re all knee deep in this shit-piss stew O’ yours. What the fuck are you gonna do to us next, buddy? i’ve fuckin’ HAD it with you!”

 

Fairbanks was working up his own counter-salvo by the colour of his face, but one of the nice things about being a superhero is you are never, ever ignored. The skintight bodysuit and flashy colour scheme got people’s attention and when we walked up both of them visibly got a grip, unwilling to argue in front of us. Since we desperately needed both of them to co-operate if we were going to make this work I grabbed the opening with both hands and ran with it.

 

“Hi. Michael Fairbanks and Mayor Mackellin, I believe? We’re the young Sentinels. I’m Astra, this is Tsuris. Megaton, Ozma, Grendel, Galatea and Crash are on the roof securing the flyer. We’ve been deployed to assist the evacuation.”

 

Fairbanks took a breath and started to talk; the mayor drowned him out with the practiced volume of the professional politician.

 

“If you’re the CAI team we’re getting, forget Fairbanks. Major Payne right here is the senior military officer, you can coordinate with to him. Fairbanks is the twat whose arse you pulled out of the fire when you stopped a fucking massacre out on the Lawton high road.”

 

Ok, forget co-operation, I going to be hard pressed to stop them assaulting each other. Fairbanks finally lost his cool, and blew up.

 

“Damn you, you stupid little _politician_ , you didn’t give two shits about the condition of the high road before! “Get them out of my town”, was your contribution, “or I’ll send em’ downriver the hard way!”. All you give a crap about is your goddamn chemical plant, and it was your idiots who-”

 

They were back to screaming in each others faces. Alright, that was it. sometimes, you just have to drop the hammer. Literally. I dropped all two hundred pounds of my favourite titanium battle-maul right onto the grass between them. I may have added a bit of force to help it make an impact.

 

An eruption of dirt exploded about three meters in the air and a thump you could feel in your gut punched all of us. Fairbanks and the Mayor cowered, which made me feel an awkward mix of guilt and satisfaction. Still, they were both suddenly a lot less worried about each other and a lot more terrified of me. They were staring at me, both of them were covered in mud.

 

“Allow me to make myself clear. We are here to assist with the evacuation. We are not here to save you, either your careers or your town. Your co-operation is needed. You will provide it, or I guarantee both of you will be out a job and into a court-room before the end of the month. The current President of the United States is a former member of the Sentinels - our testimony carries a lot of weight. So if either of you want to avoid criminal negligence charges for your conduct so far I suggest you do you jobs and work together.

 

Now. Major Payne. The northern road is beyond repair, by our estimate. The south road is in danger of being washed out. We have to shore up the road and prioritise at risk persons for evacuation as soon as possible. Mayor Miko, I expect your people to assist with that. Mr Fairbanks, FEMA will need to provide fuel for the convoys - I can air-lift it in if you can get them to put it in ten ton portables. I also want to know where we’re sending these people and how we’re supplying them. I realise we’re all under a lot of pressure, and mistakes have been made, but we can talk about how we can improve once the immediate crisis has passed.”

 

This was about as far as I got before the mayor cut me off.

  
“What about the plant?”

 

She was a little sullen, but she didn’t back down. I could work with that.  

 

“The chemical works on the river? It’s not listed as an evacuation center....”

 

“Its on fire. This idiot won’t do anything about it. What can you do?”

 

Oh, great. Well, I knew the rules off by heart by now. “Until the town is evacuated, not much. Civilian lifesaving takes priority over property damage. We’d need FEMA authorisation to divert resources unless lives are in immediate danger.  Its a chemical plant - is there anything in there that could cause a health hazard? how bad is the fire?”

 

“Apparently one of the reagent vats overheated and started burning, and now the fire suppression system is out. It’s a _chemical_ _plant_ \- if the fire spreads half of it will go skywards. And the other half of the stuff that place makes is toxic crap. They make semi-legal pesticides for export, among other things, the kind you carn’t use in this country.

 

I spent ten years of my life fighting to get the place shut as a public health hazard when I was a student, and then these idiots made me the mayor and suddenly I’m fighting to keep the place open because its the only thing keeping this town alive. That chemical plant is the only reason Barton exists and the only reason anyone here has a job. If it burns down they won’t re-build it. IPP were barely willing to invest any money in the place at all. They’ve been trying to move it to a new site for the last ten years.”

 

Ugh. Really, not what I needed. But Tsuris’s areokinetic powers could smother fires like nobody’s business and Megaton’s blast attack was surprising good at blowing out fires as well. Plus he had crazy high heat tolerance. Shelly, god help me, would have to be their adult supervision. I was going to miss having all of them for the evacuation of the town but we had to at least make the effort.

 

“... Alright. Megaton, Tsuris, Galatea, the chemical fire is yours. Is anyone out there already?”

 

“The plant has a fire crew for this kind of thing, about thirty trained volunteers. They’ve been out there since three this morning. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

 

“Ok. Either put it out or contain it, Tsuris, it’s your call. For the rest of us - Major Payne, If you can update me on the evacuation plan, we can talk about where the rest of the team can be best used.”

 

We got to work.

 

\----

 

Its sad fact that my most useful role in a humanitarian crisis is as a very flexible all weather heavy lift helicopter.  I spent four hours flying to Memphis and back carrying first loads of fuel, then medical supplies for the clinic, then food and fresh water bowsers, then repair tools for broken down vehicles, all while the team worked to keep the evacuation trucks flowing. We lost the southern road eventually, although grendel did his bulldozer impression and kept raising the road bed as it got washed out, and I had to fly in a load of light boats to set up a relay over the flooded sections. That slowed the evacuation down to a crawl.

 

At that point we finally got some help. Transport helicopters are slower, more vulnerable, vastly more expensive and carn’t carry half the weight of an A-Class Atlas type - but there were maybe fifteen Atlas Class-A’s in the entire country. We got five army blackhawks showing up at ten o’clock in the dark, with another fifty troopers for Major Payne and more medical supplies. They ferried out another load of priority cases, mostly the very old or the very young, the ones most at risk when basic services have broken down. We’d gotten perhaps one and a half thousand out on the trucks before we’d lost the road. Best guess, we still had three to four thousand in the town. We could keep their feet dry, but we couldn’t feed them, wash them or keep them warm for more than a day or two.

 

Shortly after that, Tsuris, who was getting more and more sullen every time I asked about the fire at the chemical plant, reported he’d finally got some professional help when another pair of blackhawks dropped off a fire suppression team and a guy from FEMA to help fight the blaze. Megaton just sounded tired and Shelly admitted things weren't going well, which really should have rung a heck of lot more alarm bells in my head then it did. Shelly admitting she was struggling with something was something that did not happen. I was tired.

 

It was right about midnight when the plant exploded.

 

\---------

 

I didn't get any warning. I was five hundred feet up and heading for my next delivery pickup when the horizon lit up. I saw the flash, looked up and saw a fireball rising over the chemical works, the boom arriving a few seconds later. A giant blaze underneath it illuminated a plume of thick black smoke. I screamed.

 

“Shelly! Mal, Reese, report in!”

 

“Alive”

Shelly. Of course she was fine, Galatea was only a drone she piloted, expendable.

 

Alive!”

Reese. Tsuris was most fragile of the three.

 

“Alive. Shit. Sorry boss, I think we lost this one.”

Malcolm, and he sounded pissed with himself. he’d been getting more and more frustrated all night as they struggled with the fire. But they were all alive, my team was alive. ....Right. Deep breath. Next problem.

 

“Casualties?”

 

“... Possibly. There’s about fifty or so guys from the plant who’ve volunteered for the firefighting teams, plus the ten professionals who turned up about an hour ago. They’ve been scattered all over fighting secondaries in the other buildings, but that fireball was huge.”

 

“This fucking place is designed to burn.” Tsuris sounded downright petulant. “I’ve been smothering fires all night, but they’ve got an ammonium nitrate works that went up right at the start and that shit burns even without oxygen. Every time I think I’ve got a room cleared it just smoulders then lights up again. I carn’t shut this shit down. I’ve been dumping floodwater on it but that last lot had a fuel leak mixed in. It went up like a air-fuel bomb.”

 

“Ok. I’m inbound. Get a headcount, find out if anyone is missing. Ozma, are you listening in?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Can you examine the plant for any wounded, please. Crash, we need you now. Galatea, I need a safety check on that smoke cloud, I need to know if its toxic. Grendel?”

 

“I’m on my way.”

 

“Megaton, your priority is to find out how many are missing. Shelly, Ozma and I will search for people and either Crash or me will retrieve any we find. questions?”

 

There were none.

 

“Good. Go.”

 

\--------

 

Firefighting in a chemical refinery is a nightmare I never want to repeat. Everything is explosive, corrosive or flammable. The place is a maze, designed around the giant network of pipes and conveyors with human spaces shoved in wherever they fit. It’s built on a gigantic scale. And it’s now covered in thick black clouds of toxic fumes in the middle of the night.

 

I decelerated a little as I came in, but I was still going so fast the concrete cracked under my heels when I hit the ground. The chemical plant - International Plastics and Petroleum Barton Creek Works, to give it’s full name, but everyone apparently called it the Big Creaky - was a giant, sprawling site covering about three miles of riverbank. Flooded riverbank, just to make this more fun for us, and even if most of the site was on deliberately built up embankments there was still standing water from the constant rain, drizzle or downpours filling every hollow space. And as Tsuris had just discovered, it wasn’t making things any easier.

 

Firefighting is simple. fire is basically a self-sustaining chemical reaction. You can go into detail about oxidation states and Redox reactions if you have a chemistry degree, but basically you have the fuel - the thing that is on fire - a supply of oxygen - breath in to sample some right now - and heat, which starts the reaction off and is constantly renewed thereafter by, you know, the actual fire.

 

Take any of these three things away and the fire stops. You can take away the heat by dumping water on the fire, cooling it until it goes out, take the air away by covering the fire, with say a blanket, or taking the fuel away, by removing unburned parts of whatever is on fire.

 

Doing this to a candle is easy. Doing to an entire industrial chemical works in the dark, when its all already on fire, and you're searching for wounded workers, is less easy. I carn’t really call it hard unless I ever have to try doing it without being basically invulnerable, super-strong, and able to fly, but its still pretty gosh-darn _tricky_.  

 

The problem was the flood had covered the place with oily, debris strewn water. Oil burns on water perfectly well, thankyou, and so does wooden flotsam, industrial garbage and the odd dead tree, also all on fire.

Patches of flame were floating around and starting smaller fires in the massive 3-D tangle of pipes and scaffolding and weird inexplicable bits of industrial machinery that covered the plant. Tsuris, Megaton and Galatea had been trying to keep the fire contained in the outbuilding but the explosion had nixed that idea. Now the main buildings were on fire, the storage drums were on fire, the river was on fire where an oil slick had  had formed on the water and we were just hopelessly outgunned. I didn’t know where to start.

 

“Shelly, I carn’t see anything. Can you give me some virtual help here?”

 

Augmented reality kicked ass. As I stared into the fire she built up a three dimensional map of the place in my vision, projecting over reality like a ghostly blue afterimage. The holographic model rapidly acquired highlights as Shelly did her supercomputer thing and processed videos and old data harvested from anything connected to the internet  to map out the complex around me.

 

“Awesome. How many of the volunteers are accounted for?”

 

“We’re twelve short. Crash got the rest out before the wreckage stopped falling, but one of the team is missing two people and another team hasn’t reported back. I can't track them, either. The security feed is down, but I got probable locations out of the recordings.”

 

I picked the closest one and took off again, just flying directly at it through a burning oil slick. It felt warm on my skin, like I was going through the exhaust of a particularly dirty truck. I avoided breathing it. My Atlas superpower set included infrared vision and immunity to anything cooler than superheated plasma, and few scorches weren’t going to hurt my costume either. The same could not be said for the very human volunteers we hadn’t accounted for, and I was kicking myself for even letting them try amateur firefighting in an industrial works. This place needed a couple of hundred professionals with full gear, not three teenage superheros and some half trained locals.

 

I rocketed out of the fire and turned a sharp left, right, left, dodging through the pipework at speed. I walloped a metal grid by accident and ripped it off its mounting, ripping it apart in passing and dumping it behind me. I landed again with both boot-heels, crack! on the rain splattered concrete, skipped forward and elbowed a metal security door off its hinges in a single neat motion. When I moved like this I just followed Shelly’s guiding light - she had a much better idea where to look than I did, and working together like this we made a fantastic team. I was inside a big industrial hall, and I took a moment to listen before I jumped three stories up, landed on a scaffold and slammed through another blue tagged doorway into an office complex. I cleared it room by room in a few seconds - even at this speed, if there was so much as a heartbeat in the building I could hear it. The next tag was on a wall - Shelly knew what I could do better than I did, so I leapt forward and hit it fists first. The wall exploded into wooden splinters and I was outside again, rain drenching me in the dark.

 

It took five more minutes of high speed searching before I found two of the missing volunteers. I was backtracking the evacuation route the rest of them had taken when I found a scent trail - my sense of smell was every bit as superhuman as the rest of me - and followed it a few hundred meters to a burning locker room, then to an open locker, smelled cocaine residue on the shelf and sighed.

 

Not everyone I saved in this job was an angel who was in trouble simply because of bad luck. I saw an awful lot of really bad decision making as well. They’d gotten themselves lost, and made the rest of us go searching for them in a burning chemical factory, because one or both of them wanted to save his stash. I was so going to kick their arses.

 

from there I tracked them through the plant easily enough and found them cornered in a hollow under an abandoned storage drum. They’d been trapped by another burning oil slick that had crept up behind them while they hid the drugs under the tank, geniuses that they were.  

 

I wasn’t about to waste time. When I shot out of the fire and landed next to them, I took one look at the two terrified workers, smelled the stash behind a loose brick in the foundation, glared at them, and removed it with one explosive punch through the wall. I wasn’t about to let them off on this so I held the bag out so the mask cam could document it - I heard Shelly snort - before I looked for a safe exit for the pair and seeing nothing decided to make one.

 

I hopped back a few meters, looked up and flew straight up into the bottom of the tank. Two meters of old brick and some rusted old iron plating didn't even slow me down.  A few seconds of work and I’d widened it enough to carry both of them out.

 

I left Huey and Dewey with their boss and gave a quick summary to their co-workers, who were about as impressed as I was. The other team had rescued themselves - they reported that two of their radios had had duff batteries and the other radio had gotten lost while they were running from the fireball, which was pretty typical of the kind of routine screwups that happened in this kind of mess. I was just relieved no-one died.  

  
\------

 

“Shelly, can you get Fairbanks, Major Payne and the Mayor on a conference call please?”

 

I was sitting on top of the old shift house building that the dispirited fire teams had retreated to after the blast. We now had everyone accounted for, at least. They were milling around beneath me, trying to work out what to do next. So was I, really. Hence the call.

 

“Got em. they’ve all decamped to the fire department conference room together. You’re on their speaker as of.... now.”

 

I cleared my throat and started my less than triumphant report.

“Hello all. To bring you up to speed, we’ve now recovered all the missing personnel without injury.” Thank god. Tsuris wasn’t exactly negligent, but he had directly caused the explosion in the plant. We would probably be legally covered, but the team lawyers would be interviewing me as soon as we’d cleared the town. The legalities of property damage in the course of disaster response could get hellishly perverse. Anyway. “The plant does not appear to be heavily damaged yet, but the fire is spreading. Given the possible toxic effects of the smoke plume on the workers and town, I’m pulling the fire-teams out and abandoning the plant. We’ll need FEMA to give us a priority evacuation order immediately and get the remaining people cleared within the next few hours.”

 

Our last request had not yielded much help beyond the helicopter drop, but the threat to the evacuees was now much more pressing. The wind were blowing the plume slightly north west of town, and it wouldn’t take much to shift it south. I was sure we could get the south road reopened, at least for long enough to evacuate the town, if we could get them to release some some heavy earth moving gear for us. Since it was that or put the fire in the chemical plant out, a job that would take serious resources now, I was confident we’d get the engineering support now. Not the way I was hoping to save the town, but anything that works....  

 

“...So you’re saying that having blown a minor fire into a major one, you’re now going to sit down, watch a couple of hundred million dollars of industrial plant burn to the ground, and plead for some grownup to come and pull your panties out and let you go home, now, please? This is what you’re tellin’ me?”

 

Mayor Miko, aaaaand she sounded very... Irish. Her accent was getting thicker by the second. One might somehow think she was pissed. Oh, joy. Well, she was going to have to lump it with the rest of us.

 

“More or less. I’m actually expecting us to have to do quite a lot of work to reopen the road, and or course we’ll still have to provide food and care for about three or four thousand people, but I’m calling this one. The plant is a loss, madam mayor, without serious and immediate assistance from fully equipped professionals. We won’t get that. This is a national disaster, ma’am, our resources are badly overstretched. Lifesaving comes first.”

 

“Great.” The bitterness was palatable. “So thats it then, love, we’re fucked. I’ll go let everyone know their now unemployed as well as homeless, shall I? Oh, and everything they own here is gonna be covered in toxic shit, so forget about farming here afterwards or selling their houses for money. Fuck it, I bet they make us pay for the bloody cleanup, as well. Goddamn you, and FEMA, and the rest.”

 

I really ought to be sympathetic. I really, really should. But I was so fed up of people complaining when we fail to save the day to their complete satisfaction, blaming us for all the multitude of troubles that followed when you survived disaster. Its. Not. Our. Fault. I wanted to scream it in her ears until her eardrums burst, but boiling rage met a lifetime of my mother’s indoctrination with the principles of civility and the best I could come up with was “Yes. well, can discuss fault later.” I drew a trembling breath. “Major Payne, I’m heading for the southern road. I think we should focus efforts there, please.”

 

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Little bit of explanation from your writer here, I think. This is pretty much the end of Hope Vs Disaster. The next bit, I wrote a few chapters ago, and go so into it I had about ten pages of it before I got back to the old story, which has been starved of attention for a while. This is the end of one story and the beginning of Hope in the Blood, which I will post as a separate story as soon as I get enough written to be sure of where its going. Anyway, Action ahead!

 

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Checking your work is a big part of search and rescue. Evacuations under pressure are always sheer bedlam, and the first priority of the emergency services is to get as many people out of danger as safely as possible. Only once that's achieved, then, if its safe to do it, you send people back to sweep for any stragglers. With most of the city suburbs under two feet of filthy flood water and six times the city’s normal population crammed into the center of town, checking the evacuated houses had been a lower priority. I’d volunteered, mostly because my heat vision and enhanced sensors meant I could do the checks quickly but also just to get away from Fairbanks for a while. If I spent much more time with him I was going to lose my Social Face completely.

 

I’d already picked up four groups - two of them Ozma had spotted with her seeing mirrors, which probably counted as an illegal search but whatever, and two I’d found on my own. three of them were elderly, always the group at highest risk in a crisis, and the other one had been a “family” of three kids whose parents were literally too drunk to realise the house had flooded around them. That had not been fun. I’d kept all of them company until the boats Major Payne attached me turned up, then flown them across. Long range flying while holding someone in my arms was something I’d learned to avoid - it was uncomfortable and often very frightening for them. I did give the kids a turn around their house, though.

 

I finished clearing the neighborhood and called Shelly, who was acting as our local dispatch controller as well as operating Galatea. when Shelly was wearing her Dispatch hat, it was strictly business.

 

“A2 to Shell, Sector three sweeps clear, no contacts no signals, Oz confirm please.”

 

“Copy A2, Oz sweeps sector three clear, no reflection, no trace. Sector four north northwest seven hundred -”

 

The rocket hit me square in the chest.

-

 

I was lying in mud and thorns, my gut was a ball of hot agony and I couldn’t breathe for the pain. My heart was beating so fast it thundered in my ears and I....

 

“MOVE!” hit me right in the hindbrain. I was kicking off into flight before I realised it was Shelly, and the ground erupted behind my feet and sent me crashing backwards. I hit a wall, went through it, and dropped back to ground clutching my stomach. I was covered in blood. I wanted to vomit but my diaphragm wasn’t working, I could barely get any air in my lungs. Someone had shot me. Twice. They were trying to kill me and they’d hit me with something that had cut through my breastplate and almost gutted me. I was bleeding so much I couldn’t even see how bad it was.  

 

“Shelly...”

 

“One guy, flyer, big rocket launcher, probably Atlas-class. He’s in the air and tracking you. Tsuris is three minutes away. He’s... DISPLACE!”

 

I floated upwards and started to move myself. I didn’t dare kick off again. Mistake. The roof fell on me as I started to fly and my would-be-killer landed right on my legs. I grabbed at him but I was slow and he punched me, aiming for my wound. He grazed my breastplate - that and the fact I was already moving backwards was the only reason that punch didn’t kill me. Instead he just sent me through another two walls and crashing to the floor. Something kept me from blacking out.

 

I was running on adrenaline, nothing else. I was pretty sure Shelly had hit me with something - I’d lost so much blood, and the wound was horrific, but I could still think and I could still move. I could track him now, my heat vision letting me see him through the walls. He was watching me. I needed to anticipate him, out-think him. All I needed was one clean hit....

 

He was a Atlas, but not as strong as me. B class, maybe even C, and if I hadn’t been bleeding to death from a mortal gut wound I’d have been able to take him in about five seconds. Either he’d run out of rockets or he was feeling very lucky to have tried to finish me up close.

  
  


I looked around. I had to have a weapon, something, anything I could hit him with. I’d been knocked into a kitchen pantry, there was nothing solid or heavy around, the flood was flooded, some pipes under the shelves, gas pipes, I could see an old fashioned meter... I rolled over, the paralyzing pain in my guts on the other side of thick glass wall, grabbed at the gas meter and rolled back to lean against the wall, letting my hand drop under the water. He’d see the motion, know I was still alive, and either risk closing with me - potentially very dangerous for him - or back off and abort.  

 

He couldn’t afford much time to think, he had to decide before my team arrived, and here he came......

 

He didn’t risk a slow entry. He simply launched himself at the hole. He could see I still wasn’t dead, and he aimed to ram me right in the center of mass, where I’d been hit. But I could see him too, and as he came through the smoke I snapped my arm out and threw the heavy, old fashioned pig iron gas meter as hard as I could. It smacked him on the forehead and exploded into pieces, fifty pounds of metal doing maybe ninety miles an hour. He missed me and kissed the wall, landed badly and then I was on him. I just beat on him. My first punch broke his nose, the second smashed it flat, the third broke his cheekbone - The concrete floor cratered as his skull bounced repeatedly off it and the water around me turned red. I hit him in the face until I couldn’t lift my arms, until my fear went away and the pain came back, and then I finally fell off of him and curled into a ball of agony. I was done and he was gone. When Tsuris arrived saw the mess I’d made, he threw up. 

 

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Annnd Done, its Done. For the next instalment, Hope in the Blood, you can expect it to be posted in a week or so. As for this, well, some editing required, probably - this site has an annoying habit of taking out italics, which are a big part of Hope's style in Wearing the Cape. I'll be adding them back in as and when I notice them.  Other than that, I've been enjoying this so much I've now got two more fanfic's on the boil, and no end in sight for either of them. This is so much fun! Hope you liked it!

 


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